The Postcard Read Online Free PDF Page A

Latino?”
    “Jeez, no. I mean, why should you —”
    She had already started the mower again and was finishing the next stripe of the lawn.
    “We’re selling the house!” I yelled.
    She stopped the mower again, looking amazed that I would speak again. “And . . . what?” she said quietly.
    I breathed in. “Sorry, it’s just that my dad and I are selling the house. My grandma died yesterday —”
    Her eyes widened. “I knew she was in the hospital. She’d been there before. But she always came back. I’m sorry. She was cool. She always smiled at me. Well, at everybody . . .”
    “Really?” I said. The girl looked at the ground for a second, as if she were lost in thought.
    “Anyway,” I said, “she . . . we’re selling the house, so you probably won’t have to do this anymore —”
    “So fine,” she said suddenly, “I won’t.” She pushed down on the handle so that the front wheels lifted from the grass and steered the mower around.
    “Wait. That isn’t what I meant.” I didn’t actually know
what
I meant or why I said anything at all, but I knew we didn’t want a half-mowed lawn. “Wait —”
    But she flicked her hand up flat without turning and rolled the mower away across the unfinished lawn and down the sidewalk.
    What is her problem? Man, I hate this place!
I went back into the house, slammed the door, and hunched down on the couch. “Dia? Dia? What kind of name is that, anyway? And so what, anyway?” I heard the mower start up again on some other lawn.
    I sat there and sat there. “Where’s Dad?” I said out loud. Then I saw the desk again and remembered the phone call.
    Stupid phone call!
It was crazy to think that just because some nutty old guy said “desk” I’d find something in the desk, or that this was the desk he meant, or that he meant anything at all!
    But there it stood, uncluttered and clean, and I hadn’t so much as touched it, so I decided to look. The main drawer under the work area was brushed out and empty. All the letter compartments and spaces were empty. The small drawer in the center between the compartments was empty, too. Okay, so Dad had gone through it. He’d done that much in the time before I came. It was only a piece of furniture now.
    But when I closed the little drawer, it jammed halfway in, with one side deeper than the other. I tried to jostle it loose, but when I did, something fell into the drawer from above.
    It was a postcard.
    It must have been taped to the whatever-you-call-the-ceiling above the drawer, but my jerking it around had loosened it. The shiny cellophane tape around its edges was yellow and dry.
    The postcard was old. I could tell that when I picked it up because it didn’t feel the same as a new postcard. It was heavier, for one thing. When I turned the picture side up, I must have made a strange sound to the empty house.
    It was the Hotel DeSoto!
    The same hotel the real estate agent told us about! The same hotel my great-grandfather owned!
    Holy crow! What is this? Did the caller want me to find this? Did he expect me to find it? What the heck is going on?
    I lifted the card to my nose. It smelled dusty and woody, of having been in that cramped desk drawer forever. Maybe for the last, what, fifty years?
    Try sixty. The postmark on the back was from San Diego, California, and dated March 4, 1947. There was no message on the card and no name, there was an address typed on it by, it appeared, an old typewriter:
1630 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, FLA.
Was that where Grandma used to live when she was growing up? Dad would know. The address sounded fancy. The card wasn’t like any I had seen before. It wasn’t a glossy photo of some place with a happy blue sky like modern postcards. What it really looked like was a black-and-white photograph that had been painted afterward. The colors were bright and a little too perfect. Artificial. The green of the grass was as bright as the skin of a lime. The awning reaching out from the